Space Habitat Data Centers—For Future Computing

Abstract

Data from sensor-bearing satellites requires processing aboard terrestrial data centres that use water for cooling at the expense of high data-transfer latency. The reliance of terrestrial data centres on water increases their water footprint and limits the availability of water for other applications. Therefore, data centres with low data-transfer latency and reduced reliance on Earth’s water resources are required. This paper proposes space habitat data centres (SHDCs) with low latency data transfer and that use asteroid water to address these challenges. The paper investigates the feasibility of accessing asteroid water and the reduction in computing platform access latency. Results show that the mean asteroid water access period is 319.39 days. The use of SHDCs instead of non-space computing platforms reduces access latency and increases accessible computing resources by 11.9–33.6% and 46.7–77% on average, respectively.